Every day around noon, Montreal city councillor Serge Sasseville leaves his house in downtown Montreal and crosses the street to the Russian consulate a few metres away to make a point.
“Because we have to make it known that in Montreal, we are supporting the Ukrainianto people and we are against the war,” he told Global News.
He protests daily by blasting the Ukrainian national anthem from a speaker outside the consulate.
Sasseville, who started his daily serenade a few weeks into March 2022 — not long after the invasion — said didn’t think he’d still be doing it now.
“We all thought that we, all the westerners, would be able to help Ukraine to put a stop to that war after a few weeks,” he said, “but a year later it’s still going on.”
The conflict started February 24, 2022. Since then, according to the World Health Organization, there have been over 7,000 conflict-related deaths and more than 18 million people have fled Ukraine.
“It’s a genocidal war against Ukraine,” the city councillor pointed out, and it’s more than a war against Ukraine.
He argues that it’s also a war against democracy, a view shared by the handful of antiwar protesters who gather with him sometimes, including Carole LeDez whose adopted kids are Russian.
“They are very ashamed to be Russian,” she said, “after having brought them up to be proud of their culture.”
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She worries that her children, now adults, might face backlash because of their heritage.
“At the very beginning I thought that my daughter got some hate messages on social media, but she’s more or less cut herself off from that now,” she explained.
Others, like Olga Babina who moved to Montreal from Russia in 2016, is concerned that support for Ukraine might start to drop as the war drags on.
“It’s very sad to see that people are tired,” she stated. “We’re trying to raise awareness.”
It’s one reason Sasseville and others say they plan to keep protesting outside the consulate for as long as the war continues.
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